


Nosleep collection

by TheDameintheRaininMaine



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Horror Fiction, originally published on nosleep, tws in each chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-10-28 04:46:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10824042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDameintheRaininMaine/pseuds/TheDameintheRaininMaine
Summary: Collection of short stories originally posted on the subreddit nosleep.





	1. Something Wild

I really can’t believe I ended up here.

I’m a Girl Scout, I’m supposed to be smart and responsible and all that fun stuff. Yet here I was, lost in the middle of the forest late at night with no food, a nearly empty canteen, scared out of my mind.

You’re probably thinking “Sarah, as a Girl Scout, you should know better than to go hiking alone!” probably with the undertone of “because you’re a girl, duh”. But the dangers of hiking alone can happen to literally anyone; getting lost, getting hurt. I liked to think that I knew how to handle myself. And this wasn’t my first rodeo- I had my cell phone, and my compass and I told my mom exactly where I was going.

It was a damn stupid mistake that really got me in this mess.

It was a hobby actually for me, hiking alone. I was seventeen, and my scout troop had always been the outdoorsy sort. I was never the most outgoing child. I had a few close friends, but most of my hobbies were solitary, hiking, reading, taking pictures.

Part of the woods outside our town was a regional park, during the summer it was packed with picnickers and campers, which is part of why I chose to wait and go in early autumn when most of the summer people had left. Less trash, less crowding on the trails, less obnoxious music being. There was a trail I’d walked a number of times, along the outside of the park’s land that had a turn off where you could loop back or continue on into a regional wilderness area. Backpackers often went into that area, in fact our troop had done so last year. It was too rustic for some, but I had liked it, being off where most people didn’t go.

But I hadn’t intended to even go that far that day. I just wanted to walk the trail and then turn around. That’s what I told Ranger Tim when I checked in at the ranger station before starting.

Ranger Tim had lead some of the nature activities our troop had done over the last year. He was young, just out of college, and let’s be real- cute too. Dark hair, blue eyes, shade of a beard. I never passed up the chance to stop by and say hello. He told me there were a couple of families camping up the way I was headed, but other than that there wasn’t much going on.

It was early October, and we had been having a pretty good Indian summer that year. I was wearing a flannel and had my jacket tucked in my pack. The unseasonably warm weather meant there were more people out than I had expected, but it wasn’t too bad. The leaves had already started to turn, and since it was afternoon most of the trail was bathed in a golden glow.

One of the campsites I passed had a small family in it. The kid- a girl of about five was holding the leash of a medium sized fluffy dog and sitting beneath a tree watching a family of squirrels and they ran back and forth. That made me smile. It reminded me of the few times my parents had taken me camping out here before I was a scout. It had been years since, my mother having discovered she preferred to sleep inside. I had a dog then too, a basset hound named Lucy. I used to take her every time I went outside. She had died a little over a year ago, and I missed her like crazy.

Aside from those couple campsites, most of the trail was quiet. About a quarter mile before the turn around, I passed the last campsite. College students from the looks of it- loud music, huge lights and trash. Well at least they were far from the other sites.

Ok, I did lie a little. The particular spot I was going to was beyond the turn off sign for the wilderness area, but not even an eighth of a mile beyond it. I could even still see the sign between the trees if I squinted.

It was just a little clearing in the trees, sloping onto a small hill. The grass was late-summer dead but still somehow full of the late hardy wildflowers of the season. It had gotten just late enough that the sunset hovered in the background, the whole place was picture perfect.

The year before, when our troop had gone camping out here, our leading Miss Thelma had taken us to it because the yearly butterfly migration always passed through the clearing, and I wanted to see it again.

I sat and perched myself on the top of the hill and pulled out my camera and some of my snacks. I got some great shots, but after about ten minutes, my phone died. I guess I forgot to charge it before I left the house. Oh well, it was about time to leave anyway. The sun was gone from the sky, and I didn’t want to be in trouble with the rangers for staying out after dark, So I stuffed my trash and my dead phone into my bag.

When I got up to leave, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. It was a light off on the horizon. I walked to get a closer look.

If I made even just one dumbass mistake in this whole story, this was it, for more than one reason.

It was bad enough suddenly deciding to go off the trail when it was getting dark. But I was also pretty sure I knew what I was looking at.

Miss Thelma had told us a story before, about when she was camping solo in Arizona where she grew up. She had seen a ball of light off on the horizon that hovered, moving up and down, which later exploded and left behind the smell of sulfur. Ball lightning, she told it was called, and she was lucky she decided to pack up and head back down to tell someone, because it had foretold a horrible thunderstorm about to start.

But me, being occasionally very distractible, followed where I thought it was coming from. I could punch past me.

When the light disappeared, I stopped and looked around. It hadn’t been long, maybe a few minutes, but it was gone. I didn’t smell anything, so I guessed what I saw hadn’t been lightning after all. I also realized I had gone off the trail and into the trees.

Groaning, I pulled out my compass. If I didn’t get back I was going to catch hell for this. Going off the trail can damage a lot of plants and cause erosion, and is hard to clean up behind. The trail I had been on went west, so if I headed due east, I should find it again pretty quickly.

When I finally made it to a break in the trees, two things happened that made my heart stop. One, the light in the sky disappeared completely. Dammit. Then, when I reached into my pack for my flashlight, I saw a figure appear just in the corner of my eye.

It looked like a kid- a girl, wearing a somewhat old fashioned dress and no shoes. She was pale, with dark hair and a solemn expression. But when I turned to see what the hell was going on, she was gone.

It was obviously getting late, I was getting tired and I really needed to get home, or I was going to start freaking myself out.

Then I realized that somehow I had managed to drop my compass.

Fuck.

Ok, I took a deep breathe. You don’t need a compass to navigate, people have done it all through history. I didn’t have the sun, but the moss on the trees should be a help. Find what direction I should be going in and keep heading straight.

I gripped my flash light tight. And even though I hadn’t seen another soul in over an hour, I hooked my bear spray to my belt. There weren’t really any bears in this part of the state, but I figured it should work on pretty much anything I could come across.

After about ten minutes of walking, I saw a light off in the distance.

My heart lept. Artificial light out here almost always means people. Flash lights, lanterns, street lights or headlights.

But after following it, my heart sank when it went out. I kept going, but found nothing. My flashlight must have just found something to reflect off of, even if nothing I had passed really should have done so.

It had been a half an hour of walking after that that I saw the girl again.

I tried to shout out, but she disappeared when I looked away again. My heart started pounding. I had thought maybe she was just another lost kid like me, but how did she just come and go like that?

This was only made worse by the noise I heard right after. It sounded like a dog howling. Lucy used to howl, sometimes late at night even. But it never sounded like this. This was a wild howl, like a wolf or a coyote might make. But I didn’t think we had any around here. I wished Lucy were here with me now. Even if she couldn’t do anything to help, having her always made me feel better.

Maybe it was just because I was tired, and hungry (I had meant to be home for dinner), but it scared me.

It was then that I realized I was lost.

It shouldn’t have taken me more than ten minutes to get back on the right path and find the sign for the rest of the trail that I was familiar with, but I had been out here at least an hour and I started to cry a little when I realized that I had no idea where I really was.

I sat down and took a couple more deep breaths, trying to calm myself. I had been lost before, even if never at night. My solitary nature lead to it, Miss Thelma had said, and I needed to be careful.

“Sarah,” she had said once when I was ten ish and had wandered away from our campsite. “The worst thing you can do if you’re in trouble is panic. People who are panicking don’t think straight. Fear is normal, but don’t let it get a hold of you”.

So I did everything I could to follow her advice and keep my head.

It was getting harder. My feet were dragging, my stomach growling. I didn’t dare try to find something to eat in the dark. There were edible berries in these woods, but berries can be extremely toxic if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And it was cold. It had been nice during the day, but now at night I was shivering in my thin t-shirt. I pulled my flannel out of my backpack and pulled it on.

My canteen was almost empty. I had to save what I had enough my throat was beginning to get dry. That was another reason I need to stay calm. Fear and sweat from exertion both make dehydration worse, and if I let myself get to that point, I could be toast very quickly.

So I kept walking. It occurred to me how useless most of my survival training was at this point. I had never been lost at night. During the day, I had the sun to guide me, and usually my troop mates looking for me. I had my whistle now, but I didn’t think there would be anyone near to hear me. Anyone who knew I was supposed to be out wouldn’t think I would be out of the park.

The next time I thought I saw a light, I busted it out and blew three times- short, long, then short again, the standard SOS. But no one responded, and the light disappeared again.

I heaved a deep sigh. I could see the moon, and from how high it was in the sky I could tell it must be getting close to midnight.

My stomach started to clench again, and not just in hunger. If morning came, finding my way during the day was easier, but if midnight was coming, I had been out here at least five hours. A healthy human, especially one used to hiking, can cover a lot of ground in that time frame. If I was heading in the wrong direction, I could be God-knows-where.

I saw another light soon, but this time it didn’t make me excited. I kept going towards it though. I no longer had any idea what direction I was going. I could have been walking in circles and have no idea.

Then the girl from earlier showed up again. But she didn’t immediately disappear this time.

She looked me straight in the eye. And raised her hand and beckoned for me to follow her, and then turned and faded in the trees.

She was beckoning me away from the light, into the darkest part of the forest.

I started to laugh. This was ridiculous. What the hell was happening to me? Was I getting delirious? Was the darkness finally getting to my head that I was imagining up ghosts? I considered myself a rational person, and put no stock in people’s stories of ghosts and monsters.

But being out here alone, it was an easy thing to believe.

I was exhausted by now. My eyelids were drooping, Fatigue was taking me faster than hunger or thirst of the deep terror eating at the edge of my mind that I was going to die out here.

But I couldn’t stop, I had no shelter. If something happened while I was asleep, no one would be able to find me, and I couldn’t call for help.

Another light appeared some time later. I didn’t pay it any mind. I had begun to feel that whatever they were, they were mocking me.

After what seemed like forever, and when it felt like I was about to collapse, I came to a break in the tree line.

All that was there was a cabin, more like a shack really. The wood looked like it was rotting away, and there was no glass in the window. There were no lights in it, but I knocked on the door anyway. No one answered, and when I tried the handle it was locked.

Whatever, the porch would cover me on the off chance it began to rain. If the cabin belonged to a serial killer, or a mad wildman or something, I would find out in the morning after resting.

When I sat down on the wood and laid my head against the wall, I noticed the lights back in the forest, multiple of them this time. Whatever again, I thought. It would be better in the morning.

Then I saw the girl again, at the tree line, gesturing to me again to follow her.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and sleep soon found me.

I don’t have any idea how long I slept. I felt better when morning came, less tired anyway.

But then I opened my eyes, and in broad daylight, the girl was still there.

All that fear that had been building up last night rushed over me. I was hungry, hungrier than I had ever been in my life. My throat burned with thirst, and I was feeling unstable from both.

But somehow I reached inside myself enough to yell, “WHO ARE YOU?” at her.

I don’t know what I expected. Her to gesture to follow her again.

What I didn’t expect was for her to start walking towards me.

My insides seized up and I got a rush of adrenaline. I forced myself to stand up, and ran.

I reached the tree line, glanced over my shoulder, and realized she was still coming towards me.

I turned back. I wasn’t going fast, and neither was she.

When I straightened, I made the mistake of not watching where I was going.

It must have been a tree root that caught my foot. I threw out my hands to catch myself. I felt a sickening crack when my left hand collided with the ground.

I yelled, and then forced myself to stand again. I stumbled a few more steps before the pain and fear made me fall again. This time my head met with a rock.

I had enough time to roll over onto my back and see the girl catch up with me before I blacked out.

When I woke up, my skin was burning and itching and my muscles were stiff. Sunburn and bug bites. My wrist was killing me and my head was throbbing. But I wasn’t dead.

I made myself sit up. The sun was high in the sky, it must be close to noon. Oh God, how long was I out?

I was next to a flowing creek. I jumped awake. True, drinking creek water could lead to all kind of unpleasant illnesses, but it beat dying of thirst.

There was something sitting next to me. A bundle.

I reached for it, and then noticed with shock that my left wrist had been splinted. Closer examination revealed that the sling was just my flannel shirt, knotted around my shoulders, but the material wrapped around the wound itself was thin, old flower-printed linen, splinted with twigs.

The bundle held berries. Berries that I recognized as wild blackberries that grew in the area. I wolfed them down. The tart juiced flowed over my lips and down my chin. I used my fingers to sop up the juice and bring it to my lips.

When I was done, I noticed some writing on the bundle, which I now recognized as being made of paper. The writing was crude, childish, but I could make out what it said.

“Stay by the water. Don’t follow lights. They get in your mind. Make you crazy”.

I thought back. The light had been what led me off the trail. What the hell were they? And why?

Something hard and cold brushed against my foot where the bundle had been.

I looked down, and picked it up, stunned. My compass, the one I had dropped the night before who-knows-where.

I tucked in my pack and pushed it out of my mind.

The creek was a good sign though. Running water always led to people somehow. I filled my canteen after taking several deep drinks to cool my throat. Death by dysentery would be slower than death by thirst.

As I followed it, I made to keep my eyes straight ahead. Whatever those lights were, and whatever the note-writer had meant, the creek was real, one of the only real things I could rely on now.

I didn’t know if the lights would appear during the day, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

It was still hard, my head was pounding and parts of my vision kept blurring. I got dizzy every couple hundred yards, but I pressed on.

The sun was starting to sink in the sky. I had to keep going. The idea of another night out here was something my mind wholly rejected.

I finally reached a sign. Reading what was written on it I almost whooped with joy. Clary’s creek. The creek ran through the regional park, but clear on the other side from where I was, oh far had I wandered?

Emboldened by this, I pushed on forward. It wasn’t as warm today as yesterday, and the slower I went, I still saw no one.

Just as my vision started to go dark again, a saw a light just over the horizon, before I passed out.

__

Turns out, it was the light from the ranger’s Jeep. I had a moderate concussion, I woke up half a day later in the hospital.

It would be easy to say this was a cautionary tale, to tell people “never go into the woods alone”, but for me, it was more than that.

When I told the others what happened, they wanted to go out to find what I saw.

Once my wrist healed, I went with them when I could. It’s true that there are wild things out there that people have lost touch with as we came to civilization, but there’s something wild inside of us too. Something animal that is skittish, easily frightened and hard to control. Something that can even trick your rational brain that it sees and hears things that it cannot rely on. It’s only knowledge, concrete knowledge, that let’s us deal with this wildness within us.

When we found the cabin eventually, Ranger Tim told me a story.

“There used to be this old man named Marcus Gellar who we think lived out here. He wasn’t supposed to of course, this is public land. But out here you get types like that- people who have decided to live completely away from civilization. We knew him, and his daughter Thea, people would see them now and then, occasionally coming into town for water. Then one day, he completely disappeared. We found his body months later, no one knew what happened to his daughter. This place, out here, it can eat you alive with nary a thought.”

“What happened to him?”

He points.

“About a hundred yards that way, there’s a cliff. We don’t know if it was an accident or- we found his body at the bottom”.

We walked out towards, and straight, as if cut straight out the rock, there it was. Easily four stories straight down. There was no change in the vegetation, the trees went straight to the drop It would be easy, even for an experienced outdoorsman, to not see where it started and fall, never to be seen again.

It was only when we walked back to the cabin that I realized if you stared straight from the cabin’s perch where I had slept that night, you were staring straight out to where the cliff was.

Right where the lights had tried to lead me before I went to sleep.


	2. The Freak of Maple Street

I loved Halloween as a kid. Everything about it, the costumes, the free candy, the decorations that just seemed to pop up one day and transform the whole neighborhood. We lived in California, so Halloween was also usually when the weather finally shifted from hot to less hot, which meant running around in the dark was completely possible without freezing to death. My best friend Mika was from Minnesota, and told me it was often so cold in October that they had set trick or treating hours, and they were usually set when it was still light outside.

“Really? Did people even light their jack o’ lanterns?”

“Sometimes. On the years that it didn’t rain. City council had to reschedule Halloween one year because of a bad storm that came through”

Mika had taken well to the California sun. Her Poison Ivy costume that year would have sent her mother into conniptions- for more than one reason- if it hadn’t been still so nice this time of year. It looked amazing on her though, I’ve always been jealous of Mika’s red hair.

“We’re still going out right?” I asked. I had worked hard on my costume idea that year- my sister Lucy having generously donated her JV cheerleading uniform, and my mom having put her skills as a former makeup artist for our community theater to the test. Blood and guts and wounds came alive, and as I would tell everyone I was dressed as “A school spirit”. We were just about to turn fourteen, eighth graders, just at the point that some in our grade were starting to look down on it, preferring to go to parties, usually put on by high schoolers instead. But I still wanted to go, I still loved the feeling of going around at night unsupervised, and besides, people always snuck in beer to high school parties, and showing off a costume somewhere it was likely to get spilled or puked on was no fun.

“Of course! But mom’s making Carlotta take me, and Eric’s coming with us.”

I wrinkled my nose. Carlotta was Mika’s older sister, by a year and a half. She had not taken well to California, and had made her displeasure very clear. She wore all black, with thick makeup and always wanted to talk about death. She was known to the older kids as the girl who claimed she was a witch and could curse people, and Mika said her parents were constantly on her for sneaking out and wondered if she had gotten into drugs.

“She came home with a tattoo two weeks ago. A pentagram on her right arm. Mom threw a fit. She’s been pushing her to get a job, and she insists that no one’s going to hire a teenager with a tattoo”.

I knew Carlotta’s boyfriend Eric only by reputation. He was a senior, and had two years ago lit a fire in the school bathroom that got out of hand and nearly burned the whole school down. The only reason he hadn’t been expelled, or even arrested, was because his father, a city councilman, was well respected and influential in our town.

I wasn’t looking forward to having to spend the night with the two of them, and seriously doubted their abilities to supervise.

“Why’s your mom so hyper about this?”

“She found about that girl that went missing on Halloween last year”.

“Jane Callum? She ran away” Jane Callum was a ninth grader, who had indeed disappeared last year. She had entered the papers as “the missing trick or treater”, complete with a picture of her in her vampire costume, regardless of the fact that she hadn’t been reported missing for three days after. Rumor had it always been that her parents hit her, and between the two, it was no guess for the police that she had finally had it and bolted.

“She still got freaked out, and said we couldn’t go out alone”.

But still, I thought, the two of them would probably be easy to ditch, so it shouldn’t ruin our night.

On Halloween night, I met Mika outside my house, and was surprised to find her alone, dressed in her green leggings and tank and sparkly vines.

“Mom said Carlotta was helping a classmate set up a party, and she said the two of them would meet us at the haunted house at the end of the street”.

“Widow Moore’s place?” I asked.

“Yeah, have you ever been? She’s got it all decked out this year”

“No,” I said. It was true that Widow Moore put out a great haunted house every year, but everyone still thought she was a creepy old woman. Mom had said she had used to do sets and costumes for the theater before her husband died, and that’s why she still put out the house every year. Her specialty was puppets, marionettes that she controlled by electricity and wires. Other than that, we only saw her occasionally at the supermarket. She always wore all black, and stank of ash. The other kids called her the Freak of Maple Street, and I agreed.

But still, I didn’t want Mika to think I was a baby, so I followed her down the street.

Widow Moore’s house was the last on the road, a ways away from the other houses. It had been a farmhouse, when her husband, an older man who fell to a heart attack soon after their wedding, had been alive. Now nothing grew in the fields, save tall grass that was now long dead by the late summer heat. She lived off the savings he had left behind, and made a little on the side, with of all things, a by-mail taxidermy business. That did absolutely nothing to make me think she was any less weird.

We waited by the fence on the property for nearly an hour, until it was solidly dark. The house loomed in the background, sign in the front lawn reading “Haunted House, 25 cents”. “Shouldn’t they be here by now?”

Mika shrugged. “They probably ditched us. Carlotta snuck out last night, said her and Eric were going to go celebrate Mischief Night”.

I gasped. Mischief Night was really popular until a few years when some vandals used it to completely destroy one of the town parks, and the police had to issue a curfew and mandatory citations for anyone found participating.

“She didn’t-”

“I don’t think so, but I don’t think she came home either. It wouldn’t be the first time she stayed out all night, and this morning Mom thought she was already at Marianne’s setting up for the party”.

“So should be just go?”

“Yeah, if they ditched us, they’ll get in more trouble with Mom than we will. Come one, I want to see what this place is all about”.

I tried to disguise my uncertainty as Mika pulled me towards the front porch. It was a rickety old wooden thing, still marked by remains of eggs and TP from someone’s activities last night, but the glow of lights and sound effects were already coming through the windows.

I make Mika knock on the door.

Widow Moore opened the door, dressed in her customary all black, took our quarters and said “no pictures allowed”, which made Mika tuck her Polaroid back into her bag.

The first room was set up like a vampire’s lair, with soft, almost warm sounding music, belaying the coffins and jars of blood lining the way. One of Widow Moore’s puppets, stood to the left, making a soft cackling noise.

Mika pulled out her camera and snapped a picture.

“Mika, you’re going to get us in trouble!”

“How’s she going to know? Besides, these are really good!”.

She was right. The vampire puppet moved lightly on its wires, and it’s wrinkled skin looked terrifically real. I did think it was terribly tacky that it was dressed in the same red evening gown costume that Jane Callum had been wearing last year. That did seem like Widow Moore though- to be out of touch with something that might upset the rest of the townspeople.

The next room was a hospital room, with an autopsied body on the table, split open from chest to groin. She had somehow managed to set it up so the heart in the body was glowing, and pulsing as though it were still alive. It had the same sort of realistic hair and skin as the previous. Mika took more pictures, and I tried to hide my disgust.

The next was I guess supposed to be the depths of hell. All red and black with screams in the background. No puppets this time, I guess maybe she wanted a change of pace.

Next came a laboratory with a cauldron bubbling and smoking.

The last room was back to the puppets, The setup was a witches coven, in the middle of a graveyard at midnight, with them as shadowy chanting figures on the wall, around a stone where their victim lay surrounded by candles under the full moonlight, sliced open and marked with ruins

This last puppet was still, but still suspended by wires. It was dressed as a teenager, an interloper maybe. An unlucky soul happening upon the Coven, and becoming their victim for their unholy rites. A trespasser, never allowed to leave.

Just when I was going to walk away, the last puppet jerked and began to raise itself up, making noises like a zombie. Raising the dead, a witch’s dream.

I grabbed Mika by the arm, who seemed transfixed, and pulled her out the back door,

“Come on, I’ve had enough, let’s go”.

I was relieved when we left the door, then my heart jumped with Widow Moore appeared beside us.

She reached out towards Mika.

“The camera, girl”

Mika guiltily handed over the Polaroid, and we bolted.

When we passed the line of her property, I heaved a sigh of relief.

“Ugh, remind me not to do that again”.

It was then I realized that Mika had kept the pictures from her camera. And also that she was sobbing.

“What’s wrong, it wasn’t that scary”.

She let out another sob, and then grabbed onto me.

“Emma, that was Carlotta, the girl in the last room”.

I stopped dead, and she shoved two of her pictures at me. One of the body, and one a close up of one of it’s arms.

“I recognize her jacket, she sewed the patches in herself, and the tattoo on her right arm is a perfect match. She never came home last night, I never thought anything could have…”

She threw up over the fence.

I looked through the rest of the pictures, horror dawning on me. Carlotta, Jane, and the autopsied body...I didn’t know enough about Eric to recognize him, but what if…

My stomach grew cold as the picture filled my mind. A lonely, anti-social old woman annoyed that her puppets were never up to her standards, angered by the appearance of a trouble maker on her property, a chance to really stretch her taxidermy skills…

We tried to go to the police with Mika’s pictures, but the officer who went to investigate insisted that the only puppets Widow Moore had in her basement were made of cloth and wood. The descriptions they gave bore no resemblance to the abominations we, and the other kids who gave statements, had seen that night.

Carlotta and Eric were gone without a trace, and no one else had any explanation.

I still love Halloween, even as an adult. I love the sense of community, of giving, that it encourages. Mika and I run the carnival on Mischief Night every year now to keep kids from dangerous and law-breaking pranks. We warn them.

The freak of Maple Street is getting older and older, but she still puts on the haunted house every year. We tell our own children not to go, and thanks to the unsettling stories that still go around about it, they obey. We warn them too.

For the two of us know now, there are far more terrifying things in this world than ghosts and ghouls.


	3. My mother always hated Halloween

My mother always hated Halloween

Sure, we have costumes and she decorates, and we all get to go trick or treating. But she doesn’t take any joy in it. All the preparations were met with a pinched mouth, and a sour attitude. And on Halloween night, she turns out the porch lights, locks the door and leaves out a tray of candy next to our sole Jack o’ Lantern (which is never her work, always ours, or sometimes Aunt Emily helps). Our house is never of any notice for other kids that night.

This year, when we were carving the pumpkin, I finally asked Aunt Emily if she knew why Halloween made our mother act so strangely.

“Something happened on Halloween when we were young, and it scared your mother so bad she never got over it.”

Aunt Emily had always been in our life. Even though she wasn’t really our aunt, she was family to us through and through. While me and James had apparently had a father at some point, he had never been a part of our lives. It had always just been us, Mom, Aunt Emily and Joyce and James (or as others always referred to us, “the twins”). But even though her and mom had been together since they were teens, they had never spoken of their own childhoods much.

“Halloween was different then Joyce. Not just the popcorn balls and cookies that modern paranoia traded for store bought candy. It was far more about community then. It was perfectly normal if a trick or treater came to your door, to invite them in, for a game or a treat hot from the oven. It was what we did. The holiday lost something...but maybe it was for the best”.

By this point, I had put down the carving knife, and James was sitting close to me, listening closely.

“We were fourteen that year. Your mother had given up trick or treating, insisting that it was babyish. She always was so worried about what people thought of her. I lived right next door, and we’d always gone out together. I was mad, to be sure, we quarreled about it. But your mother held her ground, and that night I left my house in my witch costume, and she stayed home, listening to Your Hit Parade and handing out treats.”

“It had been a pretty slow night, she said. The street we lived on was close to the wealthy area of town, and the other kids always flocked there for the best treats. It must have been close to nine o’clock when the knock came at the door”.

“Well your mother got up and opened the door. She didn’t notice anything strange about the boy at first. Thought he was just dressed as a hobo or something, but then she noticed that nothing seemed like a costume. He wore old fashioned clothing, they were neat but worn, and he had no bindle or hat or paint on his face. And he didn’t say “tricks or treats”, in fact he didn’t say anything at first.”

She started to open her mouth, was going to ask if he was alright, thinking maybe he was lost or something, when a cold feeling came over her. It had been a warm night, and she didn’t think the air from having the door open could have caused it, and that was when the boy asked if he could come in.

She felt herself almost saying yes, as if by reflex. Like I said, this was a perfectly normal thing in those days. But the coldness overwhelmed her.

She tried to say no, but it wouldn’t come out. So she tried another tactic.

“Where are your parents?” she asked. The kid looked young, under ten, so she figured his parents must have taken him out. She ducked, trying to get a better look at his face, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. The sense of unease in her gut grew, threatening to overwhelm her, but somehow she couldn’t break away, couldn’t ignore the boy.

He asked again, “Can I come in?”

And this time, she finally said “No”.

He still wouldn’t look at her, but he responded with “You should really let me in Evelyn, it’s cold outside”

Fear shot through her. She hadn’t told him her name.

“The others don’t want you here. They know you don’t belong.”

Truth is, Evelyn’s family had never had much. She got picked on sometimes, for her shabby clothes, for never having what the other kids did. It was part of why she was always so desperate to do what she should, or what people thought she should. Her dad worked nights, and her mother worked- well at all was strange then. She’d had to work overtime that Halloween, which is why Evelyn was home by herself that night. She’d been alone before, and it was never a problem. But now she felt it, trapped, isolated by this kid who knew more than he should.

She said that she cast a glance next door, to my house.

The boy must have noticed, because his next words came out after a sadistic laugh.

“They know too. They hate you don’t you know? They see how you look at their daughter. They call you an abomination. Say you would be better off dead.”

She couldn’t move at all then, couldn’t say a word, she was paralyzed.

The kid smiled again after this. “So come on, let me in.”

Emily was crying now. James and I were transfixed. Aside from this story, we had never seen her like this. She was strong, could always take anything that happened, anything anyone said about her, and keep going. She was a journalist, worked at the town newspaper, and was as smart and sharp tongued as they came.

“She said would have. At that point, the cold and darkness had hit her so hard she would have done anything, and barely registered it in her mind. She was lucky. “

It was late, and I had finished trick or treating, so I had come up to my house, left my sack of treats on the porch and tried to go inside, but the front door was locked.

I didn’t really think anything of it, even though no one locked their doors then, so I went next door, figuring I could stay until Evelyn’s parents got home and could get my mom to let me in. I walked up behind the kid when he was still at the door.

I didn’t think it was strange, and I was in a hurry to get inside because I was tired, so when I came up the walk, I reached out and pushed the kid aside.

Evelyn said that I broke whatever trance the kid had over her right then. But before she could react, the kid had roared, and reached out and grabbed my arm with both of his hands.

I screamed, his touch burned me. I could hear the flesh sizzle. But I didn’t cry then, because I got a look at his face then.

He was pale, but not like a monster would be pale. In fact, he looked almost normal save his eyes, which were completely black.

Evelyn rushed to dial 911, and the kid was gone.

Emily shook her head at this point.

“She hated Halloween ever since. Refused to talk about what happened when she came to visit me in the hospital. Didn’t listen to what I told her. Didn’t even react when the police went over to my house and found my mother the same night.”

Emily had never told us about her family before, we certainly didn’t know them.

“The police went over when the ambulance came for me. They found her on the kitchen floor. They eventually decided that it must have been self inflicted.. Her eyes were gone, and her throat slit. The knife was on the kitchen counter. As gruesome as it was, there was no one else it could have been. She’d been alone, and even though she’d been seen passing out things to trick or treaters earlier, the door had been locked from the inside.

I was in the hospital for a week, and had to go in every week for months after to get the burns on my arm cleaned. Evelyn and I stayed as close as ever, even when it was just my dad and I in that house. But she was proper and conforming as ever. She never spoke of that night, even when I tried to talk to her about what I found. She said anything supernatural of the sort was “ridiculous”. That kid had gotten under her skin and never got back out.

We had finished up the pumpkin listening to the story, and Emily threw away the guts and newspapers and lit the inside of it.

“Your mother associated what happened that night and never enjoyed Halloween again. I never told her I had found stories about deaths like my mothers. Not here, other towns, other states. None of them happened on Halloween. I definitely never told her that stories of the black eyed kids came from all over, all times of the year.”

She took the knife, and went to the sink to wash it,

James whispered to me, “That can’t be true can it?”

I didn’t say anything to him, but the story weighed heavily on me into the night.

I woke up in the middle of the night because of a noise. I got up from bed and went to the kitchen. I found Aunt Emily, in her nightgown, extinguishing the Jack O’ Lantern, so it must have been midnight.

She nodded at me.

“Alright Joyce?”

I nodded, but was distracted by her arm. Aunt Emily always wore long sleeves and coats, no matter the weather, but I had never given her arms a second thought.

On her left arm, stretching from shoulder to elbow, were scars. Deep ones, that cut into her flesh and created dips of red-brown that looked shiny and rough.

Exactly in the shape of hands gripping her arm, as tight as they could.


	4. The Toy Doctor

All children believe their toys can speak to them. I just never grew out of it.

I was engaged to a man in the city when I was young. It ended in tears, and when I moved back home, I knew I wasn’t meant for that kind of life. So with a small loan from my father, I turned an abandoned storefront on Birch Street into a toy hospital.

It was never a very lucrative job, but I enjoyed my work. I made enough to furnish the little apartment above the shop and keep myself with a large enough supply of books. The kids in town knew me as “the toy doctor” and always brought treats to the shop when I finished a repair.

I was good at the work, good at sewing and oiling small gears. I could send a toy back looking brand new.

I would whisper to them as I fixed them, and they told me their secrets right back. The usual, a teddy bear would come in with half his stuffing missing and an explanation of “we were just having too much fun”. A doll with roller skates annoyed at being stuck inside.

Sometimes they were sadder. Some kids just didn’t like their toys. Unwanted ones would get thrown down the stairs, brought in by unaware parents. Others spoke of painful sibling rivalry, bullying, or emotional battering by parents. I would try to whisper back support, and advice, to give the owner some strength when their friend was returned to them.

The first one to make my heart stop was a Raggedy Ann that belonged to a local banker’s six year old daughter. She came in with half of her hair pulled out. I went to fetch the yarn and the needles (Raggedy Anns thankfully use a very common and inexpensive yarn hair).

When I was threading the needle, I heard her whisper, “Daddy comes into her room at night. It makes her hurt and cry. Mom won’t listen”.

Face frozen, “That’s terrible” is all that would come out of my mouth.

“She wants it to stop but doesn’t know how”.

I steel myself, making the first stitch to her head.

“Can you ask her to leave you on the stairs one night?”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“We’ll get in trouble”.

“Would having him gone be worth it?”

She doesn’t respond, so I finish sewing the yarn back on.

Sally is delighted when she comes to get her, and I notice that she won’t look her father in the eye.

I found the newspaper article a week later. Found dead in his home, ruled an accident. A fall down the stairs.

I clipped it, and kept it. Sally’s Raggedy Ann never turned up again, and my job returned to normal.

Then today happened.

Most of the time, the toys I fix are brought in by their owners. Children. I know most of the people in town, so billing isn’t a huge deal. My prices are fair. Only rarely does a parent bring in the toy.

Mr. Markowitz was a science teacher at the local high school. He was a tall, thin man, with slightly too long hair and horn rimmed glasses. He came in clutching the doll in his hands.

“It was Natalie’s favorite, Susan doesn’t play with it much, but I can’t bear the thought of throwing away something she loved so much. “

I nodded. Natalie Markowitz’s death had been a tragedy for the whole town. She had been the well loved town librarian for years. No one knew what had possessed her to drive into the path of oncoming traffic on the highway that night. The library had been closed since.

I picked the doll up. I recognized her immediately. She was one of the original string-pull talking dolls, I must have fixed dozens of them my first few years working. The same blonde pigtails and neat white skirt and red sweater. They called her Babbling Betty. Treated as a family heirloom, a collectible. Susan Markowitz was nearly a teen, she was unlikely to actually play with her anymore, if ever.

I pulled the string, only to hear a slow, crackly moan. Luckily, I still had nearly a dozen spares for this, from dolls that turned out to be damaged beyond repair, left in my office for parts.

When I set aside my tools and pulled the string on the doll’s back, it let out the perky actress’s voice saying “Mama!”

Then, in a lower, tired tone I would have expected out of a war veteran, Betty said “I can’t do this anymore”.

“What can’t you do anymore?” I asked, putting away my tools in the drawer and reaching for the washcloth to wipe of the doll’s plastic skin. I expected something about hearing Susan and Mark grieving. I did not expect what I heard next.

“I kept the shadows away from Natty for so many years. They would come out from the closet, and I would try with all my might, pull my own string and yell out into the night. It scared her sometimes, wake her up. She never saw the shadows scatter when I did it.”

She sighs. Hearing a doll sigh is a strange thing. It sounded as though she could use a good drink.

“Then she put me away, in the garage, where I couldn’t even knew if they were still coming for her. When Mark brought me out, they had already gotten to her.”

Another long pause, as I wiped all the signs of age from her limbs.

“I thought maybe they were gone. But they came out of the closet again last night. I was on the top shelf, above them. I pulled my string so hard I pulled it loose, and toppled off the shelf. That woke Susan, but when the shadows scattered, I heard one of them laugh when I lay there on the floor. I can’t do it anymore”.

I never considered myself a very religious woman, but I did believe. I believed as hard as I could as I brought my tools back out and opened Betty back up.

The small metal crucifix fit neatly into the spot between her voice box and the plastic square covering it that I screwed back into place.

“When you go back, get onto her bedside. The closer you are, the easier it will be to protect her.”

Betty looked at me with her solid, plastic dark brown eyes.

“The shadows might find you”.

I smiled softly.

“I have an advantage. All the toys here, they all still tell me what they see at night.”

Then I fixed her dress, and went to call Mr. Markowitz and tell him the job was done.


	5. The 4am Breakfast Club

I hate working the night shift.

I don’t even get the luxury of less work. Patients who sleep at the hospital still need their meds, still need their pain charted, admissions come in from the emergency room regardless of if it’s eight pm or five am.

We turn down the lights, because night time is supposed to be for sleeping. The lights still on glow unnaturally, buzzing and illuminating corners. Everything slows, save for the beeps and alarms that come as always, in a rhythm that could drive you mad if you listen hard enough.

My friend Vivian works up in maternity. They don’t get the luxury of slow down there, and she says the lights are as bright as ever. But she hates the night shift as much as me, so we always take out lunch together at the same night.

So pretty much every night, at 3:45am, we head to the 24 hour diner down the road.

Alice and Lenny have been there as long as I can remember. Lenny bustling back in the kitchen, and Alice bringing us our orders. They both are sometimes there on their days off too, Alice in her housecoat and slippers doing a puzzle over coffee, Lenny reading a book in one of the back booths. Alice told me once she’s counting the days until retirement, though I can’t image what she will do when she reaches it. Lenny got the job after a short stint in jail for robbery. He says he treasures every night he can see the moon.

It’s the $4 early breakfast special that keeps up coming back. Eggs, and style, bacon and sausage and toast or biscuit, with coffee or juice. Vivian and I always get coffee. A nurse might as well have it instead of blood.

The same group always trickles in around 4am too. George, the big old beat cop, calls us the 4am breakfast club.

There’s him, and Alice and Lenny, me and Vivian. Arnold, the twenty-two year old pizza guy, who’s usually stoned enough that the night doesn’t get to him. Jenny, the gas station clerk who looks far too young to even be up this late, instead of in bed waiting to go to school. I’ve seen the scars on her arms though, she hasn’t led a happy life.

There’s an ever changing group of paramedics. The two in tonight are named Donald and Renee. Young, and strong the both of them, and not yet eaten alive by this life.

Louise from the hotel a block away used to come to, but she just had a baby girl, and her nocturnal activities are of a different sort now.

Transients find the place pretty frequently, and they always seem to know why they’re here. None of them tonight though, I guess it’s too close to winter.

George has a new partner with him tonight, I notice. Hispanic kid, looks barely out of college. Like he would be bright eyed were it daytime. He has circles, and I reason that he must be brand new to this.

They were sitting in the booth behind us, so I craned my neck and nudged him.

“First timer? What’s your name?”

“I’m Jose” he replies. He’s pale, and thin looking.

“Do you live alone Jose?” he nods.

“Good. It’s better than constantly reminding people that you need to sleep during the day. Others never seem to get what it’s like for us”. My last boyfriend had been like that. Forgetting to leave the curtains closed, blasting the radio when he got home from work.

“I didn’t expect the cold” he said.

I nodded. “Keep your jacket with you all times of the year. Before the sun comes up seasons might as well not exist”.

Alice interrupted us, “It’s 4:17, about time again.”

I nodded and stood up.

Arnold’s voice came from the other side of the diner.

“I’m out tonight guys, the doc says that if my insomnia gets any worse, it’ll kill me.”

Vivian rolled her eyes. “If you didn’t smoke so much weed, you might be able to sleep at regular times instead of in your car between deliveries.”

But this hadn’t been the first time he had bowed out. We all guessed he would be gone before the end of the season.

We followed Lenny into the cellar. It had been a store room before the diner expanded, and now it was pretty much ignored. The stairs were rickety, the only source of illumination a single light bulb on a string. Alice pulled it, letting us see our way down.

When we reached the bottom steps, I heard Jose behind me whisper, “What the fuck is that noise?”

“Just ignore it” George said, his usually jovial voice stretched.

“It sounds like… that domestic disturbance last night, the baby crying in the next room when we were trying to talk the guy down…”

He sounds almost like he’s crying himself.

“Shut it out.” I said, “Definitely don’t let it get into your head. If you think you hear it later, blast it away. Use music, anything that distracts you. That’s how it gets its claws into you.”

When I had heard it, it sounds like the whine and crash of metal on metal combined with the sound of my mother wailing. Vivan had heard bugs burrowing. Jenny had been inconsolable the first time.

As Alice passed me the knife, Jose had his hands clamped over his ears.

I had a scar on my right wrist that my ex’s dog had give me. It looked ordinary, and was easy enough to reopen and let out the requisite drop of blood that I flicked off into the abyss.

I heard Jose whimper as George showed him how to use the skin behind your ear because it bled but would heal cleanly.

“This isn’t a movie, don’t slash your palm. You need the use of your hand”.

The noise had risen to near deafening levels when the knife finally got passed to Jenny, who quickly rolled up her shirt sleeve and reopened one of the scars her father had left her. I knew just from looking that it would probably never heal.

The noise changed then, to a soft growl of contentment, and the customary glow took over the cellar before going out, just long enough to catch a glimpse of the slithery movement.

Jose practically ran leading us all back up the stairs.

When we reentered the main room, Arnold had fled.

“Asshole didn’t even pay his bill” Alice noted, shaking her head.

Vivian reached over to grab her last crumb of toast as I took my purse.

“We better be heading back to the hospital” I said, looking back at George and Jose, the latter staring at his oatmeal.

“You working tomorrow night George?”

“Always” he said, glancing uncertainly at his partner.

I shook my head as we left. Not everyone can handle working the night shift. I hate it myself, but it feels like I have to do it. Hopefully if Jose couldn’t he would quit, leave voluntarily. Before the nightmares got to him.


	6. The Hollow

No one ever leaves the hollow. No one has since the monsters came.

We all grew up hearing the story of how Pastor McCann’s mother Mary-Ellen was the only one who heard the voices, the noises, the sounds of the beasts. How she gathered her newborn son And the few folk who believed her and fled from the monsters into the deep hollow, too treacherous for anyone to go.

None of those folk had much. The couple buildings here were here already, tarpaper shacks and a church that looks like a stray ember would burn it to the ground. A few tools, rusted now, and one family brought their sheep and hogs, that give us meat and wool. A copy or two of the good book,

The sun never shines here, or so it seems. The woods are so thick hardly any would make it through. In the light of day, the children forage. At night, we gather in the church and tremble. On Sundays, Pastor McCann preaches, of the world how it was before, how the monsters came from the realms of Satan. And we all imagined, what would become of us if they found us.

The monster’s don’t come every night, but enough. The growls and whines and inhuman shrieks all haunt our dreams, but we never know when they will come. Even during the day, under the light of the sun through the gray haze and the forest canopy, sometimes they will come, roaring so loudly the ground itself will shake.

Timothy swears he saw one’s eyes once, staring at us through the trees and coming closer and closer, until the shrieking got too loud for him and he ran. No one believed him. We all knew to run the first time we heard them. Even in the light of day.

In the light of day, we go about the rituals of living. The men hunt and repair our buildings. The women clean and tend the animals. The children go out into the woods and forage. On Sundays we sit in the church and listen to Pastor McCann, and watch as the older children are brought to the Lord with the mark on their forehead that would announce them as the ones who stood against the monsters.

There’s maybe fifty of us left. We may be the only real people left. No had left the hollow since Mary-Ellen brought us here, when she was a young woman. She is now old and gray, and we may never know what has become of the world.

Honestly the thought never even occurred to me until the day Laurie Mary asked me while we were in the field picking flowers.

Laurie Mary’s mother Anne-Marie was the smartest woman in the hollow. That was why Pastor McCann entrusted her into teaching all the children to read the Lord’s word. But she was cold, her thin lips always presses tightly together, never even a hint of a smile.

That day in the field, Laurie Mary told me,

“Mama’s been talking about purifying Laura Lee”.

Laura Lee was her younger sister, and she was wrong. She couldn’t speak like the other children, couldn’t be trusted to go forage, she couldn’t remember what berries and mushrooms would kill us in an instant. Her father took her and she took care of the sheep, the big wooly beasts having no quarrel with her.

But when I heard the word “purify” my eyes went wide.

“She can’t! She’s just a little girl!”

We all remembered the Purification. Five years ago, Pastor McCann, who had just been Joseph to everyone then, had caught a monsters down all the way in the forest while him and Timothy Leary had been hunting. It had made it all the way over the bottoms of the cliffs at the end of the hollow, far too steep for any real person to have made.

They had dragged it back to the church, gibbering and yelling and making vile snapping noises with it’s jaw. They tied it down to a stone outside the front of the church.

Pastor McCann had taken a torch and declared that the capture of the beast had proven that they could be beaten by the Almighty power, and that we should purify it in fire, as someday the Lord would to the world.

I was only seven years old, but I remembered it. It fought against the ropes, even as the old Pastor had pushed the rake into it’s flesh. There had been moments it had almost looked human, but it was too ghastly pale, it’s legs had bent back and the sounds coming out of it’s mouth, though they almost sounded like words, were a mockery of our speech.

It’s screaming had blended with the shouts of the rest of the adults as Pastor McCann plunged the torch into its gut and the the flames spread and engulfed the beast.

The adults all spoke of the day as a day of triumph. All I could remember was the sickly sweet smell of the smoke.

And that memory was all that came up when Laurie Mary told me.

“We have to take her and leave” she said.

Somehow, that still shocked me.

“Laurie, we can’t. You know the monsters are out there, we would never make it. We’re only safe from them as long as we stay here”.

She stared off into the distance after that.

“Mama never liked Laura Lee. When she was a baby she said she didn’t look like us”.

That sent a small flutter in my gut. I remembered something that my own mother had said to me once, about how much time Anne-Marie and some of the other women spent with Pastor McCann. She said he picked them, rather than they picked him.

“Everything Laura Lee couldn’t do was an affront to Mama. Even when she started having those horrible fits”.

There would come times when Laura Lee would fall to the ground and shake. They were frightening, but she always came back. I’d always figured she was sick, but I had heard a couple of the older adults mutter about monsters. I always told myself that if she could come back from them, she must be strong.

I never told Laurie Mary about the time I had heard one of the older women say Laura Lee should have been culled like the other broken babies in the hollow. But something told me she heard it herself.

“She talks about purification, but the good book tells us to take care of the weak, for they are godly. I guess she didn’t read that part. I but I heard her talking to Pastor McCann, and he agreed.”

Laurie Mary was one of the smartest people in the hollow, like people said Anne-Marie was. She could read more than the rest of us, and did. And if she occasionally got whipped for talking back, she always said it was worth it.

“I know there are monsters out there, but if they try and do this to Laura Lee….then they’re in here too. “

“We have to leave. Will you come with me Polly, if we leave?”

She was looking straight at me, with eyes that reminded me of when old Mary-Ellen would go on in church. But she was also pleading. And I knew in that moment I would do anything for her.

And so I sucked up my fear.

She reached up to touch my mark, which still had not quite healed. Hers was long scarred over.

“We leave tonight”.

Tomorrow was Sunday. If they were truly going to purify her, it would be at services tomorrow. But I didn’t know how we were going to get away. Everyone always gathered and slept in the church after supper. Someone would for sure notice the three of us missing.

It turns out, I didn’t need to worry.

During supper time that night, we heard the noises from our shacks.

Everyone gathered in front of the church, where elderly Mary-Ellen was on the ground.

It wasn’t the first time she had started speaking in tongues, but it was the first time that she had begun to shake and quiver along with the words. Everyone was surrounding her, hanging on her every word.

I felt Laurie Mary grab my arm, and pull on it, whispering.

“Now! While we have a chance”.

Just as we were turning to leave, I saw Mary-Ellen’s words stop. Her mouth kept moving, but no more words came out, and she had begun to still. I saw Pastor McCann run up to her, but then turned back and ignored it. Whatever it was, it should give us a head start.

Laurie Mary had scooped Laura Lee onto her back. When we entered the forest, I was for the first time happy that Laura Lee couldn’t talk. She looked miserable, tears on her cheeks. She couldn’t understand what was happening, and would probably be inconsolable if she could.

After about a mile of walking, Laurie Mary stopped, and leaned against a tree, heaving.

“Polly, can you take her? You’re so much stronger than me”.

Papa had always said I was so much stronger than the other girls, that would be a shame when I grew up and he lost me to the women and I couldn’t haul wood for him anymore. Mama just laughed and said I could hold the sheep when shearing time came.

But Laura Lee’s eyes grew wide, and she made a sound low in her throat when I picked up and hoisted her onto my shoulders. She was barely five years old, but a well-grown five, and I was glad I was here, because Laurie Mary wouldn’t have been able to carry her for long.

Instead, she took the lead. We’d lived in these woods our whole lives, but navigating them in the dark was treacherous. We had to go slow, and just hope that if the others knew we were gone, they had either decided to not pursue us, or to wait until morning. I felt tears prick at my eyes when I thought of Mama and Papa. Would they ever know what happened to us?

After what must have been an hour or two of walking, I realized Laura Lee had fallen asleep. I nudged Laurie Mary and told her we should rest. If we kept going in the dark we were sure to get lost. She agreed.

We had just found a spot by a tree to lay down when we heard the first monster roar of the night, piercing the darkness.

God, it was so much louder out here, I could feel it in my skin, even when I covered my ears .I saw Laurie Mary tremble when she covered Laura Lee’s, hoping they wouldn’t wake her.

“I didn’t even think to bring blankets”. She said when it finally quieted, eyes tearing as I imagined mine were too.

“What are we walking into?” she says. I don’t have an answer. I just pressed closer to her and Laura Lee and tried to sleep.

We woke as soon as the thin morning sunlight broke through the trees, and stood and kept walking. Laura Lee was still sleeping, and Laurie Mary kept touching her head. It had never really occurred to me that Laurie Mary wasn’t close to anyone in her family but her. Anne-Marie was cold, and her father, Matthew, was the loudest and proudest of the hunters, and I couldn’t recall hardly ever seeing him with his family.

No wonder she was so desperate to get Laura Lee from the hollow.

By the time the sun was high in the sky, we reached the end of the thickest woods, where the steep climb out of the hollow began.

I put Laura Lee down, and turned.

“Let me go first, go slow, I’ll try to find the safest path”.

Easier said than done. There were spots of the climb where I could put out my hands and touch the ground in front of me without bending. I used loose branches and bushes for handholds. Twice Laurie Mary fell, and I had to carefully back track and pull her back up. Parts of the ground would sometimes break away under my hands and feet.

At one point, I realized Laura Lee’s head was twisted back towards the hollow. I cupped my hand to my ear to listen, and I wondered what she heard following us.

By the time the climb ended, we were exhausted, thirsty and starving. The creek that ran through the hollow emptied out between two sheer, unpassable cliffs, so there was no water to drink. Laurie Mary’s hands were bloodied from the rough plants, and my throat burned.

It had taken us nearly half the day to get through the climb, and it was already night so I told Laurie Mary to get some rest while I tried to find some food. When I tried to forage, I saw a dull light from somewhere in the hollow, and my hair stood on end.

I came back with only a small handful of berries, to find the two of them both sound asleep. We were all exhausted, so I ate a few of the berries and tried to sleep too.

I was the only one who heard any of the monsters that night. I guess I was just too keyed up to sleep as deeply as the others. I swore it was just a tree or two away from where we were sleeping, at one point, I almost swore it was above me. I could almost feel it’s breathe. But the sounds quieted this time, and then drifted away.

We awoke when the sun came back up, and continued walking over the top of the hill.

I could have cried when we crossed it. The sun was out, and it was shining more brightly than it ever did back home. The ground over the side was much flatter, even if there wasn’t much there more than empty fields.

I turned to Laurie Mary and roughly embraced her. She put Laura Lee down and took her by the hand, and we continued walking.

We crossed some sticks on the ground that caught my eye. They were laid out in straight parallel rows, continuing as far as we could see, and were made of the same sort of aged rough metal that I had only seen in the few farm tools we had in the hollow.

Soon after, the ground changed, and became a strange, smooth dark stone. Again, I looked down one end and laughed when I realized it must be a road. We picked one direction and headed down that way, towards an area where we could see more trees, hoping that if we could find water we could follow it to people.

I was almost elated, wondering what we had spent all this time being so frightened of

Then I heard Laurie Mary cry out.

Laura Lee had begun to have one of her fits, so she let her down.

Watching these were always horrible, she would shake and twist and if you tried to touch her you would swear she was possessed by something much stronger than a little girl. This time she had tinges of pink foam at the edges of her lips.

When she finally stilled, Laurie Mary reached out to touch her.

“Laura-” she said, voice tremulous. She was usually awake after these fits, if a bit confused, but now she was still.

Before any of us could figure out what had happened, I heard a noise, louder than anything I had heard in my life.

I turned and screamed, when I realized barreling down the road, was a monster. It was huge, and shining brighter than the sun, and it was coming right at us.

I started to cry, and tried to get Laurie Mary to pick up Laura Lee and tried to run, but the smaller girl was dead weight.

Then it stopped. It stopped and something got out, and all I could remember was the beast we had purified in the hollow all those years ago.

It came closer to us. It too, was unimaginably pale, wearing unrecognizable garments with shiny spots

I shook as hard as Laura Lee had when it came close to us.It pulled out a strange looking box, and I jumped. It opened it’s mouth, but rather than a scream or roar, something almost like words came out.

“Dispatch, I’m going to need medical near the eastside cliffs. “ It put away the box, and….knelt closer to me. I realized that below the shiny discs I had seen, it had what looked just like human eyes.

“Jesus Christ, what are you kids doing out here all alone?”

He reached out and tried to touch the mark on my forehead, and I pulled back as fast as I could.

My shaking only worsened. I didn’t know that monsters could invoke the name of the Lord.


	7. Mrs R's Girls

I found the book while snooping the first time Mrs. R left me home alone after I was placed with her.

I mean, those three weeks hadn’t been bad- true Mrs. R was weird. She was older than all of the foster parents I’d had before, and the only single woman. She always smelled strange, like some kind of cooking herbs. I had thought it was her cigarettes, but it was a sharper, earthier smell. She always wore this black shawl, like you might wear for a Grim Reaper costume. And I wasn’t allowed in the basement, where she did her work (a mail order business for candles and incense and other new age stuff). On the first day I was at her house, she’d emerged from the basement and given me a bracelet from some sort of hemp like rope and told me to always wear it, but wouldn’t explain why. But she did cook great meals, and there weren’t ten other damaged kids shoved in the house, and even though she always harped on me do my schoolwork and the chores she gave me, I couldn’t really complain. She may have been an odd person, but at least she didn’t treat me like a walking check.

I’d been in foster care since I was eleven years old, and I was seventeen now. I could handle weird.

You get used to it after a while. To having to shove all your things into one garbage bag and drag it into the social worker’s car like a hobo. To constantly changing schools and always being the new kid with a target on your back. To nothing in your house being yours. The other kids would come and go, the thieves, the attention whores, the biters and slappers. The good ones too, the ones that made you cry when they left, or just cry for them. Over the five years, I had had exactly one foster sibling I loved like a real sibling. I still had Mary-Anne’s picture in my wallet.

But nothing really prepared me for what I found one day.

I had finished the vacuuming after getting home from school and pulled the meat out of the freezer for dinner. After that, I didn’t really have anything to do. Mrs. R was gone on some kind of errand, usually she would have found me some other chore like weeding her huge garden or helping her sort through the mountains of stuff in the garage she bought at junk shops and garage sale and resold at other garage sales and junk shops while tutting about idle hands.

But now I was by myself. I hadn’t been here long enough to have friends to sneak out to see, and honestly I probably wouldn’t have to sneak even if I did. And Mrs. R was the first of my foster mother’s who didn’t freak out when I touched her stuff, aside from the basement rule, so I decided to screw around and check out some of her stuff.

I found the book on the shelf below her nightstand, It was old, bound in leather with yellowing pages. There was no title on the cover, so I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be.

It was full of pictures. From the first page, I thought it was some kind of history book. The first picture was a young woman dressed in simple clothes like a pilgrim, drawn in ink. Later pages had early photographs, of what looked like stone-faced settler girls, or street urchins like you might see in a musical. About a third of the way through they became more familiar. School portraits, vacation pics.

All girls, from early preteens to my age or a little older. A couple of pages would have two pictures of the same girl, over a few years.

The last couple pages made my chest freeze.

The second to last girl was Naomi Mitchell. She’d once broken my favorite toy and then my left hand when we were in the same home. Her father had been an angry drunk who beat her relentlessly, and that had became the only way she knew how to act. She didn’t stay long, very few families were willing to keep her as violent as she could be.

On the same page was Yolanda Meyers. The girl with the wide blue eyes and girlish pigtails whose mother had spent her childhood selling her for meth. She’d been pregnant the last time I saw, in the emergency care of a family who had only wanted to adopt her baby. She was thirteen.

And the last? I knew her face, her big brown eyes and her curly braided hair. And the huge scar from where her mom’s boyfriend had hit her with a brick. She looked nearly the same here as she did in the picture I had of her at twelve years old in my wallet. Mary-Anne Gibson.

Mary-Anne was the only person I ever let call me “Beck”. Rebecca was too much for her. Her speech had never properly returned, and she laughed randomly. I had heard our foster mother once say she was going to end up in a group home sweeping parking lots for a living.

It was near impossible to keep track of others once you left the same home. Letters came and went, emails if you were lucky enough to have one, went unanswered. I had no idea what had become of Mary-Anne, or why Mrs. R would have her picture in this book with girls far too long ago to have been under her care.

I was so absorbed that I didn’t realize when Mrs/ R had returned and walked up right behind me.

“I see you’ve found my album”.

There was no malice or shock in her voice, but I still jumped out of my skin.

“How long have you been a foster mother?” I asked, trying to sound casual. I’m not sure if I succeeded.

She sat beside me, and flipped to the front of the album.

“Quite a while, as you could probably guess”.

She glanced at the pictures fondly.

“It was different before. You sometimes had to buy them to get them away. Others you could just speak to and they would come with you the next day with no trouble. Now the government pays you to take them. Either way, they have always existed. Sad girls, broken girls, girls who have been hurt. They’re all so full of anger, so full of despair when I find them. They’re all so happy to take up my offer”.

She stands, and gestures to me to do the same. She picks up the album, closed it and tucked it under her arm,

“It’s time I showed you”.

I could hardly believe it when she opened the basement door.

The stairs that led down for rickety, and the only light in the place was from a dim overhead bulb.

In fact, it looked pretty boring. Her tool bench was the only piece of furniture uncovered, with the unmelted wax and candle molds, and bundles of incense, a top a large stack of shipping labels and boxes.

Then Mrs. R pulled a sheet off the figure nearest to the bench. What was under was….much more surprising.

They almost looked like dolls. Plain dolls, with no faces or clothes. Each one was bound with rope and wrapped in paper. There must have been over a hundred.

She picked one up and handed it to me.

“Unwrap it”.

I did as she said. The paper was one of the newer ones, and unrolled easily.

On the paper was a drawing in crayon. I recognized the style. Mary-Anne had always referred to her mother’s boyfriend like a hideous giant, like from a fairy tale. There was quite a lot of red crayon on the paper below the giant’s head.

“Fall from a crane on his construction site. A human skull vs concrete isn’t pretty”.

My stomach went cold.

“So you….”

“Over my years, I have gained more than a few special skills” she commented airily, as if she were talking about dinner. “Skills in the area of revenge can be very lucrative.”

She reached under the bench, and pulled out a blank doll, it’s body of soft white muslin.

“I find a little taste of revenge is fine for quieting the angry soul. It paves the path for life to continue”.

She offered me the doll.

I froze, at the implication of her words. But I cleared my throat.

“Uhh, thanks for the offer Mrs. R, but...honestly I don’t think I’m angry enough at anyone. ”

She put the doll away, a bit stiffly.

“Well enough of that nonsense then” she said, turning back for the stairs. “It’s time for supper anyway.”

The rest of the night, I felt a bit ill. Mrs. R had been nothing but kind to me, and somehow I felt like I’d offended her. She’d helped so many other girls like me...how many had rejected her help?

But it was the honest truth. My parents hadn’t beat me, or yelled, or been criminals. They just didn’t want me, and when they decided they didn’t want each other anymore, neither of them would take me. I was passed any resentment for the selfish people who never should have had me.

The next day, I went to the library after school, to study for a history test. Mrs. R had no computer in her house, had scarcely even heard of the internet. I chuckled. As old as she was, I could understand how it might seem a passing fad.

I had finished my work, and was just browsing when a thought occurred to me. Curiosity, several of my teachers had said, was entirely the reason why I remained a reasonably good student. It certainly wasn’t a work ethic or desire for scholarship.

The article was easy enough to find. Arthur Marsh, 38, dead on the job at local construction site, three years before. I laughed. It was exactly like Mrs. R had said.

That would have been the end of that, had the related article linked at the end caught my eye.

“Special education program rocked by local teen’s suicide”.

I felt the breath leave my body.

I knew before I even clicked.

Mary-Anne, dead six month previous. She’d hung herself in her new family’s garage.

The rest of the article was claptrap, about the impact of her disability, and the failings of the nearby town’s mental health services. What a load of bull.

I’m clever, despite my upbringing. My above average measured IQ listed on my paperwork from county services like a low interest rate sign at a local dealership. I knew what I had to look for next.

It didn’t take long. The local library was linked with all the others in the county.

Yolanda Meyers, struck and killed by an SUV, age sixteen. She wasn’t named, but the picture with the article was all I needed.

Naomi Mitchell, one of six killed in a fire at a local concert venue. She was nineteen.

I hushed the cold dripping fear in my gut the rest of the evening, through dinner.

As soon as Mrs. R had been asleep, I snuck back down into the basement, softly opening the door and setting it to.

My quiet nature has aided me throughout my life.

I switched on the overhead light. The tool bench was still there, as was the one with the dolls. Uncovered still, with the blank doll still sitting atop the others.

I started pulling the rest of the sheets off.

Most of what was under them was unremarkable, but I knew what I was looking for as soon as I saw the old chest.

It was wood, and well worked. Oiled and finished throughout the years.

It was unlocked, so I opened it.

The inside was full of the same dolls, but none of them were bound or wrapped in paper.

Instead, each was tied with a lock of human hair, and dredged with the red brown stains only caused by human blood.

And deep in the chest, I found a glass vial, full of a shimmering liquid, that was nearly empty.

I shoved it hastily back, and the dolls on top of it. The last doll that fell into the chest was different. It was the only in the pile that wasn’t bloody. It did, however already have the wrap of hair. Hair in the same soft, red brown shade of my own.

I jumped, reaching up to touch the top of my head. It took me a while to find it, the small section missing on the nape of my neck. Likely taken while I was sleeping. Taken from me like the life from those other girls, taken in unequal exchange for some small act of vengeance for their broken lives.

Knowing what I had to do, I looked through all the items on Mrs. R’s tool bench.

It never made it into my paperwork. I was a quiet kid, a good students. Why mention the wastebasket fire or the incident with the firecracker when they had been so clearly accidents?

It was true, that I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t abused. But I was lonely, and I was neglected.

And after all, who could ignore fire?

Mrs R hand painted and wrapped all the soaps and incense and candles she sold. Paint, when under pressure or mixed with components, is quite flammable. Paint thinner, for little accidents, moreso.

A knocked over spray paint cannister on the lowest steps, lit by a candle began to burn almost immediately. Sparks caught the sheets almost immediately. When the smoke filled the basement, I stuff the can of paint thinner with cloth, and lit it too, like a fuse.

I set it in front of Mrs. R’s bedroom door, then ran like a madman.

The neighbors called 911 when I showed up in my pajamas, crying and yelling. By the time they got there, the house had been consumed. Mrs. R had been fond of wood.

I’m emancipated now, I live in a nearby town, supporting myself by working at the 7-11. I cut my hair, to hide the missing lock even from myself. I still look over my shoulder everywhere I go.

I’ve read all the stories, but I still don’t trust fire to kill the witch.


	8. The Pied Piper of Glicar Beach

You don’t let your children off by themselves in Australia, not anymore.

I mean, you don’t do it really anywhere in the developed world, except maybe in a few small communities. Here, everyone talks about the disappearance of the Beaumont children. No one else seems to remember the Pied Piper of Glicar Beach, just a few years before.

Glicar Beach was a tiny community then, and it’s only dwindled since then. When I was a child, we would visit my grandmother there, and I hated it. It was always too hot, and aside from go to the beach, there was nothing to do.

My grandmother was the age of the children who went missing that day, and she’s told me a thing or two that didn’t make the papers.

Seventeen children between the ages of eight and thirteen. Nearly the entire town’s population of that age. All observed leaving their homes with no comment or provocation at about 7 o’clock in the morning.

No one paid any mind at first. It was early, sure, but it was a Saturday, and even kids had places to be. These were still the days of free unsupervised days of play.

It wasn’t until late dinner time the calls started coming in about them not coming home. It was Mrs. Beale on White Street, who remembered seeing her son Timmy and a few of the other children following “the dark man”. She did not elaborate further.

This was the part that the media latched onto. Within days the entire state was looking for a kidnapper, a pervert. Someone who could have groomed a whole town’s children to follow him mindlessly, who could have done anything to them.

The treatment and harassment of the small Aboriginal population in the area following was a disgrace.

There were attempts over the coming decades to link the disappearance to dozens of other crimes in Australia, but nothing was ever substantiated.

The summer I was thirteen my parents dumped me at Glicar Beach to stay with my grandmother. As upset as I was, I had also been looking forward to the freedom.

The third day that I walked to the beach proper and returned to my grandmother’s house disappointed by not finding a single playmate, was when she told me the story.

“It’s terrible to be a child here now. As much as the rest of the world has changed, it feels worse here, ever since all the children disappeared”.

She coughed. As long as I could remember my grandmother had chain smoked.

“I remember that morning. I was with them.”

That got my attention.

“We woke to the music, and we couldn’t help but follow it. It was so beautiful. Music wasn’t a part of our lives really. No bands ever came here, the town had no musicians. So when we heard that melody, what else could we do? I still remember the tones”

She placed her fingers in front of her, as if playing a flute.

“Fa-la-mi-do-”

Nothing in the official story had mentioned music.

“We couldn’t see where it was coming from, but we still followed. I didn’t think anything at all, until we all reached the beach and headed for the cliffs.”

The edge of Glicar beach was a large formation of rocks, that ascended and twisted, sided with cliffs on two sides. There was no way down, except the same way up, and no one ever even really did that.

“We reached the rocks and everyone started to climb. Everyone. Shirley Walker who lived next door. My best friend Lucy Keyes. Timmy Beale, the little coward who ran from the tiniest of snakes. None of them should have even been able to do that. No one ever played there, it was too dangerous, and should have been impossible for a child to make that climb. But they all speed up those rocks as though bewitched. I don’t even know why I tried”.

She tapped her right leg. My grandmother had had polio as a child. That leg was always weak and never grew as much as the left.

“I’m still not sure how I even made the walk. But when I tried to follow Shirley up the rocks. My leg buckled underneath me and I fell. I didn’t even feel any pain until I could no longer see the others. Then suddenly the music in my head stopped and I fell to the ground. I was so overwhelmed, by fear, by uncertainty that when I got up I just ran”.

She sniffed.

“My parents were so happy to see me come home alive, they never questioned it, and no one ever seemed to realize I was with the group. I wasn’t ever allowed outside on my own after that. Not that it ever really mattered. All my friends were gone. And to this day, I can still remember that tune. ‘Fa-la-mi-do-’”.

She was now openly crying, but I couldn’t resist asking.

“Did you see the dark man they were following?”

She shook her head.

“But whoever he was, all I can picture him as is our Pied Piper, his music drawing us to those cliffs. I’m still not sure Mrs. Beale wasn’t just seeing things”.

The next day, I walked all the way down the beach, and stared at the rocks.

It wasn’t just because of the story, but after that summer I never went back to Glicar beach until my grandmother died when I was twenty-five.

My mother wasn’t ever close to her own mother, so my boyfriend Paul and I ended up working through all of her effects. There weren’t many and it didn’t take long.

Glicar Beach had only gone downhill since my childhood. More and more buildings were boarded up on Main Street, and the one trip I had taken to the beach had already included finding needles in the sand.

The last day we were in town, Paul suggested we go for a walk along the beach.

The two of us could be termed thrill seekers. We’d met on a group backpack in the outback a few years prior, and in those between years had gone rock climbing and rafting. A “walk” along the beach wasn’t exactly a romantic cliche for us.

I didn’t even realize how far we’d gone when he pointed and asked about the rocks.

“You ever go up there?”

“No never,” I said with a sick feeling in my gut.

“We’ve got the equipment, why don’t you?’

I do not know for the life of me why I said yes.

I strapped up, and Paul held my line, and I started slowly ascending the rocks. I had no anchor, I couldn’t have seen well enough to secure it. I had done free bouldering before, but this was obviously a bit different.

The boulders at the bottom were of widely varying heights. Hand holds ascending were few and far between. Many of the rocks were worn smooth. There was no way in hell a primary school aged child should have been able to make the climb. Even with my experience, and my climbing shoes, I was still uneasy.

I reached the seeming top, and looked out around me. It truly was a great view. I took a step towards the crevice of the cliffside, and took it in.

I nearly stumbled, and fell. A few inches from the top, was was a crevice in the rock. The entire formation, apparently cleaved straight in two.

It wasn’t large, maybe third a meter wide, by two meters long. I picked up a pebble and threw it. I did not hear it land.

I looked at it a while longer. So deep...and it was completely black. Only so wide...no way to fall in I supposed, at least for an adult.

But a child…..

I had a vision suddenly, of someone climbing, of finding the crevice. Of having to turn, to wiggle, to squeeze, to get down….

And then in the distance, I swear I heard pipes.

“Fa-la-mi-do-”

The suddenly, my legs were pulled out from under me and panic gripped my chest, I scrambled for hand holds before I hit my head and blacked out.

I woke up in hospital, with my Paul by my side.

“Jesus Christ babe, you scared me to death. What happened up there?”

I didn’t remember.

“You got to the top and just stood there. I yelled a few times trying to figure out what was up and you didn’t respond at all. Then you bent and crouched like you were going to jump...I panicked and yanked your line.”

Paul’s panic broke two of my ribs and my left ankle. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had saved my life.

Bandaged up, we left the next morning.

The whole area surrounding Glicar Beach is rural. People often don’t realize what huge stretches of Australia still are. The natural landscape, still often unchanged since ancient times.

I stared out the window on the way home, Paul driving. I idly started whistling the tune I heard that day, the one my grandmother heard for the rest of her life.

“Fa-la-mi-do-”

And suddenly I whispered.

“Follow me down”.


End file.
